The 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist is Announced

Scott Griffin, founder of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry, has announced the International and Canadian shortlist for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize.

The seven finalists, four International and three Canadian, were chosen from 560 books of poetry read by this year's judges, Tim Bowling (Canada), Fanny Howe (USA) and Piotr Sommer (Poland). On Wednesday June 3, the finalists will be invited to read in Toronto at Koerner Hall at The Royal Conservatory in the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning.

The seven finalists will each be awarded $10,000 for their participation in the Shortlist Readings. The winners will be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize Awards on Thursday, June 4, with each winner awarded a $65,000 prize.

Open Book is celebrating National Poetry Month with daily profiles of today's "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Find out what inspires, confounds and delights the poets behind this spring's new releases by following our series.

Gillian Sze follows her acclaimed 2009 debut collection, Fish Bones, with The Anatomy of Clay (ECW Press). Divided into two sections — the externally observant "Quotidianus" and the inward-looking "Extimacy" — the poems in The Anatomy of Clay mould and manipulate the Promethean myth of human creation, looking at the self and the individual as both mundane and miraculous. Poet Jennifer Still finds Sze's poetry to be brimming with "contagious lyrical energy."